Wall Street just doesn’t understand Deere & Co. (NYSE: DE). No surprise there: There’s a Rolls-Royce dealer a few minutes from the stock exchange, but the nearest John Deere dealer is more than 50 miles away, and it mostly sells lawn tractors. The massive heavy-duty agricultural equipment, the large tractors… Read More
Value Investing
It’s no wonder Warren Buffett loves railroads so much — they’re a simple, easy to understand business. In fact, his investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B) has a stake in three of them. This is exactly what Buffett was talking about when he said… Read More
What the mind can conceive and believe, it can insure (my apologies to Napoleon Hill). You already know from personal experience about insurance on your life, your house and your car. But maybe you didn’t know you could insure your wages, a business can insure its directors and officers, and… Read More
When the Lakers were looking for someone to lead them to a national championship, they turned to Hall-of-Fame coach Phil Jackson. He had a proven record: Six NBA championships during the 1990s. Hiring Jackson paid off. Since hiring this proven winner in 1999, the Lakers have won four NBA championships. Read More
It happens every quarter, and it’s beginning to grate on me. While every other company is gauged by earnings, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) is measured by a different standard than the rest of the financial world. Read More
William Grant & Sons Distillers, in business for more than 120 years, recently released a limited-edition variety of its Glenfiddich single-malt scotch. The amber whisky has been quietly aging under the Glenfiddich Distillery’s Warehouse 8 in Dufftown, Scotland, for a half-century. At $16,000, it is one of the most expensive… Read More
Warren Buffett may well be the most-watched man in the world. No paparazzi are camped outside his house, but there’s a huge cult of investors that hangs on the famed Oracle of Omaha’s every word. So news that Richard Santulli had stepped down as the head of Berkshire Hathaway’s (NYSE:… Read More
Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, once described his strategy as “buying dollars for 50 cents.” He would have loved this market. Graham had several tricks to determine whether a company was undervalued. One of them was assessing its book value, a figure… Read More
In a perfectly efficient market, we could never buy a stock at a discount or sell one at a premium. Every security would be perfectly priced, all the time. It’s only through irrational, emotion-driven selling that value investors will occasionally get the chance to pick up a $50 stock for… Read More
Warren Buffett has sold 16% of his 48 million shares in Moody’s Investors Service (NYSE: MCO), which he has held since 2000. It’s exactly the right move. Earlier in the week I wrote that this should happen after reading the lawsuit filed by the… Read More